Judith Butler and the ethics of 'difficulty'

Critical Quarterly

Volumn 45, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 42-51

  Salih, Sara ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33748649561     PISSN: 00111562     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8705.00505     Document Type: Review

References (31)

1. Judith Butler, 'For a Careful Reading', in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (London: Routledge, 1995), 133, 138
2. For Butler on difficulty and style, see also Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990; Anniversary Edition, New York: Routledge, 1999), xvii-xx
3. 'Butler Writes Back', New York Times, 24 March 1999, accessed 21 October 2000
4. 'Changing the Subject: Judith Butler's Politics of Radical Resignification', interview with Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham, JAC, 20:4 (2000), 727-65 (pp. 731-6)
5. Martha Nussbaum, 'The Professor of Parody', New Republic, 22 February 1999, 〈http:www.tnr.com/archive/0299/022299/nussbaum022299.html〉, unpaginated. Butler is not responding to Nussbaum when she comments on clarity
6. Nussbaum, 'The Professor of Parody'
7. The terms are Derrida's; see Jacques Derrida, 'Signature Event Context' (1972), trans. A. Bass, in Peggy Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 93, 97
8. Butler, Gender Trouble, xviii
9. David Trotter, The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1984), 6
10. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 45
11. Butler acknowledges that 'translations' are sometimes necessary, particularly in the classroom. See Butler, 'Butler Writes Back'
12. Judith Butler, in the Routledge Critical Thinkers series (London: Routledge, 2002). The Judith Butler Reader is forthcoming from Blackwell in 2004
13. See for example Lois McNay, 'Subject Psyche and Agency: The Work of Judith Butler', Theory, Culture and Society, 16:2 (1999) 175-93
14. Nancy Fraser, 'False Antitheses: A Response to Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler', in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell and Nancy Fraser, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge, 1995), 59-74
15. Fraser, 'False Antitheses', 67
16. Nussbaum, 'Professor of Parody'
17. Olson and Worsham, 'Changing the Subject', 732
18. For discussions of performativity, see Butler, Gender Trouble, 33, 163-90
19. 'For a Careful Reading', 134-6
20. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (New York: Routledge, 1993), 11-16
21. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 242
22. Derrida, 'Signature Event Context', 104
23. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 99
24. Judith Butler, 'What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault's Virtue', in David Ingram (ed.), The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy (London: Basil Blackwell, 2001) 212-26
25. The point is Dominic Rainsford's: Rainsford argues that Butler takes a step beyond the 'endless waiting and listening of the Levinasian stance', by not simply ceding to the other, but asking the other 'who are you?' (Dominic Rainsford, 'Solitary Walkers, Encountering Blocks', European Journal of English Studies, Special Issue on Ethics and Literature, 7:2 (2003)
26. Butler, 'What Is Critique?' 00
27. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5
28. Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987; New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 19
29. John Guillory, 'The Ethical Practice of Modernity: The Example of Reading', in The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, Rebecca L. Walkovitz (New York: Routledge, 2000), 29-46 (pp. 31-3). The division might seem a little too neat, but Guillory attempts to bridge the gap between the two classes of readers so that both may cultivate reading as an ethical practice
30. Guillory, 'The Ethical Practice of Modernity', 39
31. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 51-2